Originality is probably over-rated, but blogging certainly reveals the commonplace nature of ones thoughts, and the difficulty of making a genuine conceptual scoop. A couple of days ago, Tim Dunlop and I had almost identical posts bagging a relatively obscure Op-ed piece by Liberal MP Petro Georgiou.Mine is here

Today, I was looking over some American blogs,and came, via CalPundit , to this quote from Ken Layne

As I’ve written before, the California GOP is run by bitter losers who can’t seem to understand why the party is doing so well on the national level. While Bush has something for everybody in his administration — blacks, Jews, women, Latinos, moderates, Ashcroft, even an Afghan — the California party is still stuck in the disgusting race baiting and abortion grandstanding of the Pete Wilson years.

In the Fin in July, I observed that

while Bush pitched for the votes of Spanish-speaking immigrants, fellow-Republicans like Pete Wilson, former governor of California, ran hard on border protection and preservation of the status of English as the dominant language. Wilson’s successful campaign in 1994 was based on ads showing grainy video footage of ‘illegals’ crossing the Mexican border, with the voiceover, “They keep coming.” Wilson hoped to ride anti-immigrant sentiment all the way to the White House in 2000, but, thankfully failed.

I don’t think much of Bush in general, and looking at Ken’s blog I probably disagree with him on a lot of things too, but we share the view that Bush is genuinely non-racist, which makes up for a lot.